Engagement Paradigm: Defining the value of “followers” on Twitter

I was chatting with PepsiCo.’s Bonin (@boughb) and Josh (@jkarpf) about engagement last week when it occurred to me that the term “follower” may have sent a lot of people (and a few companies) astray when it comes to looking at depth vs. breadth of engagement. (I love these kinds of conversations. I always walk away with tons of ideas and insights. Great stuff.)

We will actually cover depth and breadth of engagement tomorrow, so hang tight, but first things first. Today, let’s focus on redefining what a “follower” actually is (and watch the video for a deeper perspective into today’s topic):

A follower is NOT a little duckling who actually follows you around like you’re his mama duck. A follower is not an impressionable outcast looking for a cult leader on Twitter. A follower is not a faceless, mindless joiner who just happened to accidentally click “follow” when your last comment popped upon their screen. In other words, followers are not zero-value dry little seashells you can collect to show how cool you have. Followers are not points and this isn’t a game.

Followers are people (for the most part), and these people tend to follow you for a reason. If you aren’t trying to game the system to build followers for the sake of having as many of them as possible, chances are that you are creating genuine value through your activities on Twitter. Earning followers is a measure of the success of that engagement, particularly as it pertains to the value that you offer to these specific people. If you are relevant (important, even) to their world, to their experience on Twitter, they will opt-in to your “feed,” to your content by following you. If they don’t find you relevant or important, they won’t follow you. It’s that simple.

What people (and especially companies) need to understand immediately if they don’t already is that everyone on Twitter is a community manager: People on Twitter aren’t just individuals, they are at the center of a specific community that they shape every day by opting to follow or unfollow accounts that matter or don’t matter to them.

When someone opts-in to your content, to your specific voice, feed and opinions, they are bringing you into their community. They are endorsing you. They are vouching for you. And they are sharing you with everyone else in that community. Whether that community is 5-strong or 500,000 strong is inconsequential to today’s discussion. (We’ll get into it more tomorrow.) What matters to our discussion today is this: Followers are not “followers.” Followers, as community managers, are potentially promoters, advocates, ambassadors and advisers. Followers are tremendously valuable to companies looking to foster real engagement on Twitter or in Social Media as a whole. Followers are the lifeblood of engagement in Social Media because they ARE your community. Not just that, they are the individual managers of hundreds, thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of interconnected communities that transcend the digital/real world barrier: Relevance, importance and recommendations online do impact relevance, importance recommendations and ultimately transactions offline. (If you’re a business, that last one is pretty important, whether or not you are comfortable admitting.)

So when it comes to followers, and particularly numbers associated with followers, don’t get sucked into depth vs. breadth arguments: There is no winner in the ‘less is more‘ vs. ‘more is more’ debate. It isn’t about less or more or too many or too few. The discussion you really want to have centers around whom, why, how and what: Who are our followers? Who are they really? Why do we matter to them? Why do they want to engage with us here? How do we fit into their world? How can we fit into their world even better. What are their expectations? What can we do to improve their lives or experience in some way? What can we do to engage an connect with them better?

If you can start looking at your community of followers as more than a number, as more than a gaggle of “consumers” waiting for your next campaign pitch or discount code, you will be on the path to true engagement in the Social Media space, particularly on Twitter.

If you start treating your followers like the community managers they truly are, your understanding of “engagement” in social media will already be years ahead of most of your competitors still scratching their heads about the “value” of being on Twitter. If you don’t yet glimpse how that will impact your overall success (and traction) in Socal Media and in reaching your “engagement” objectives, you’re still way behind the 8-ball. No worries though: Tomorrow we chat about engagement in terms of breadth (volume) vs. depth (connection), which will bring some clarity to this whole thing if it’s still a bit fuzzy.

27 Responses

I subscribe to the less is more camp. It is not about having 10K followers, we can all get them if we want to. It is about building your community and having that community interact with those of your followers – in the creation of a mega-community of knowledge-sharing.

I so sincerely appreciate everyone who follows me (OK, maybe not the bots and MLM people) because they are helping me get better at what I do, and widening my knowledge and my community. I met about 1/2 of the people I follow by looking at the people who follow me and their followers. Some of them have been amazing contacts that I could not have made otherwise – at least not in this short timeframe.

Sadly, I think that the true value (and potential role) of a follower is still fuzzy for more people than you and I think, especially Social Media hacks and (unfortunately) many measuring peeps who look at “followers” strictly as people to broadcast to as opposed to everything else they often are. Just to be sure, I thought I’d bring it up, in case it helps lightbulbs go off over a few people’s heads. (You never know.)😀

Absolutely. It’s amazing how many of even the most “forward-thinking” “social media experts” who “get it” don’t understand this principle.

It is so important to understand your audience as everyone uses Twitter differently. It’s not like a product or a TV show (everyone uses Pepsi in a similar way), where the number of users or your show’s reach or ratings are all that matters. At the end of the day, having 100 followers with one of them being Oprah can be greater than having 10,000.

Social networking and media is about *connecting* – if you don’t connect with your “followers”, then you’ve lost. Period. If your brand is big enough, maybe you’ll get the hits and pageviews and followers and retweets anyway, but if you’re not engaging your community and listening, then you’re not adding value. And if you’re not adding value, you’ll be tuned out eventually, one way or another.

I’m actually starting a little qualitative analytics test on my own, to see the difference between a small twitter following of “friends” vs. “followers”. I’d like to figure out what measurable difference there is in having a group of people with whom you actively interact vs. simply building a large following of users who auto-follow.

We’ll see – if you’d like to check out the experiment, you can find it here: Twitter Experiment

It never ceases to amaze me how many people (and brands) totally don’t “get” the importance of followers as community. Or how many people loftily think that its worthwhile to “collect” followers while deigning to follow only the ones they “deem relevant” to themselves back. And, when I ask the question: If you only follow those “relevant” to your field of study, business, etc., what about all the other followers you ignore – followers who could ultimately be your future customers? …. they don’t bother to answer. In my mind, that kind of engagement in social media is little more than worthless and not much better than broadcasting at an audience via other, more traditional forms of advertising and not social media at all.

Bottom line, social media is all about engaging and engaging, to me, is a two way street. And obviously, it is to you as well.

Thanks! Yeah, the “collection” of followers is pretty worthless outside of a purely ego-driven exercise, but the miscalculation that cracks me up is the selection of certain types of followers by some brands based on their perceived “influence.” For example, focusing on followers who have large followings vs. followers with small followings. The logic there being that engaging with only 50 people on Twitter, you might ultimately reach 500,000. #FAIL!😀 I run into this occasionally, and while the logic of it is pretty sound on paper, the reality is a little more complex: Maybe those 50 influencers don’t give two sh*ts about your brand and no amount of coaxing will change that. So you’re stalled until you figure out a way to “unlock” them. Meanwhile, 200,000 true fans are begging for attention and you blow them off, expecting your 50 “chosen ones” to do all the work for you at some point. Don’t even get me started on that.😀 Grrrrrrr

That last sentence of your comment above nails it. It’s the word itself that causes all the misunderstandings about what is actually going on on Twitter – and to a lesser extent on other networks. The word “Follower” carries a wide variety of connotations – from “acolyte” to “stalker” – and of course these do not (necessarily!) apply to the online relationship.

If Twitter had chosen a more accurate term it would create less confusion and antagonism. ‘Contacts’/’Connections’ are boring and ‘Friends’ is a bit creepy (and demonstrably inaccurate in most cases); furthermore none of those have the directionality of followers/following. I can think of 2 or 3 far better and more appropriate terms – but they would be wasted on Twitter, which blew its credibility as a serious medium as soon as it started by choosing a name and an image that explicitly and unashamedly references a mindlessly chattering bird.

Interesting points, David. I see where you’re coming from with the bird imagery, and yeah, you’re correct to some extent. The “branding” of Twitter doesn’t necessarily come across as a legitimate business tool for old-school business people who like good old fashioned synergistic names like Microsoft, IBM and Tech Data. That being said, the founders of Twitter probably weren’t thinking of those guys when they created their hip little microblogging platform, so when you put the name and branding in context, it isn’t so bad. (Point well taken though.)

I definitely agree with you in that words and names are VERY important, and the term “follower,” in this instance has probably done more harm than good in helping people and companies understand the true dynamics of human interactions on Twitter.

I have been following you for several weeks now and I am definitely getting a lot out of being part of the community.

As a community manager, I want to build a satisfied community that gets something useful out of being part of that community. I know I can use Discussions and Polls in LinkedIn to gain feedback from the community.

As a new Twitter user, is it appropriate to use Twitter to ask questions of my community on why they value their community membership?

Sure. People love to give you their opinion (whether you ask for it or not) so why not ask for it? 1. You’ll know what people think, and 2. they’ll appreciate that you took the time to ask. It shows that you care.😉

I appreciate this post and perspective so much. It has been amazing to me, how people perceive large numbers of followers – it’s almost crude. I have had strangers make offers to me to pimp their stuff to my followers, had people try to pay me to get followers for them… even supposed friends and definitely prospective clients have tried to “use” me to get their message in front of my followers – almost as if my influence over other people is some form of test to pass. They want to see what I can “do” for them with my followers. It honestly leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though I don’t express it.

I don’t know all of the people that follow me – a lot of folks just like to lurk and don’t interact, and then some of them are bots and spammers. But all of the people that follow me and that I follow and interact with, I consider my friends – maybe that word is used a little loosely – I don’t know them well or get together in person with the majority of them. I do like to follow back nearly all that follow me, but get behind on doing that. But these are people I LIKE – not people I want to “use” for anything. These are people that say kind things about me and help me when I have a problem or question, and try to cheer me up when I am down or discouraged. They both amuse me and tolerate my antics as friends I have of long-standing do. They are very special and important to me. Why everyone doesn’t feel this way about the people they interact with socially online is just beyond me.

If I was working for a “big brand” I would feel honored people wanted to play with me online. The fact that they do speaks volumes about their loyalty and brand attachment.

This post summarizes my angst with social media. Working with any sized brand, most think “social media is cool, we need to be cool” – and what is the easiest way to measure that?? – by number of followers. WRONG.
Establishing an arbitrary number of followers/fans as a “KPI” is so far off the mark on why social media is effective. I think that as brands cultivate relationships via. social media, they will realize that thoughtful content is step one to building engagement.

Yep. I hate gimmicks too. As Teresa mentioned here today, “stop worrying, start engaging.” Do you need a strategy and a plan? Sure, but engagement is just about opening your doors and being a good host/guest. At the very least, it fosters good karma and good PR for your brand, and that’s a pretty solid accomplishment these days.😉

Nice video, Olivier. Very well spoken (even though I’m a little surprised you don’t pronounce your name French…).

I think it is difficult to “get” the value of followers, as there are so many different types of people on Twitter. There are people interested in conversation, but others just use it for information, entertainment, monologues, spam etc. That’s why I totally agree with your breadth vs. depth conclusion.

Marketers need to learn that dealing with communities is different than dealing with consumers and can’t be measured by the same numbers. That’s basically a social skill, but nothing they teach you in marketing classes. Maybe that will (have to) change in the future?

So I agree, but I’m not sure saying that here is too out of the ordinary. Seems that most commenters (to date) are like minded on this one. (Rare – good work Olivier!). I guess that’s why I’ve not signed up to any automated tools and have ‘only’ 150ish ‘followers’.

In my mind I always imagine the “community manager” concept as a diagram like a web of webs. Each person acts as a bridge between each node. (Probably like the diagrams of the www that used to get flashed around 10 years to try explain the concept). It’s kinda like Malcom Gladwell’s “maven” concept – each person acts as a bridge between other people. LinkedIn understand this well when they show the number of people in your ‘network’ as first, second and third degree.

And to respond to in2l, I’ve often been tempted to tweet “why are you following me? what do I tweet that is helpful/important to you?” but never got round to doing so. Maybe I’ve not had the courage in case there are no responses🙂 I’ll try it now!

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Olivier, thank you for this. ‘Followers’ is such a loaded term, and you have perfectly explained why. I vet my followers very carefully, and find that the questionable ones I let hang for a few are almost always the ones who bail because I don’t follow them back. I’m also wary of any follower that isn’t announced by an email.

What I get from followers, in terms of support for my work, appreciation for my tweets, and an amazing window into life-everywhere-else-right-now, is priceless. Thanks again.